CRAFTKHANA: A Journey Started At IIM Kashipur

“To any entrepreneur: if you want to do it, do it now. If you don’t, you’re going to regret it.”

- Catherine Cook, co-founder of MyYearbook.

The entire course outline of subjects in a management course tells us only one thing – Minimize your regrets and take the opportunity. We five people of IIM Kashipur decided to do just that – not to wait for things to happen, rather make things happen. And with this thought a startup idea was born – CRAFTKHANA. One fine day in the month of February we decided to do something that can leave behind a legacy of our names. At the same time, we wanted to use the location of Kashipur to our advantage. After much deliberation, we decided to go with an online platform for home décor and crafts, which are available near us. What made our job easier was the presence of Moradabad near us, which is one of the biggest hubs in India for Metal Items. With this, a business plan was developed. Next step for us was to create the buzz for CraftKhana on social media platform. Before announcing anything we decided to create a website to list down all that we had to offer. Also to reward people who registered with us early we gave first 100 people who registered on our website.  To reach out to people we became active on facebook, And within 10 days we had 1000 likes on our page. To keep them engaged, daily posts were shared on the page. One big decision that we had to take was to finalize our supplier for metal products in Moradabad. One trip to Moradabad and one day later we had a manufacturer who was ready to supply metal items at a discounted rate to us. With this, we eliminated two levels of middlemen from the supply chain and hence could price our products much lower than any of our competitors. Over the last few months, we have also added 4 new suppliers and 2 more ranges of product which includes woodwork. Our biggest success story is a tie up with NGOs in Delhi who help ladies in Kumaon region to develop Aipan, which is a dying art of Uttarakhand. This is our initiative in helping the people who actually need a platform and in turn increase our product base. Our professors and Director Sir have been guiding us throughout this journey with valuable inputs and sharing their experience with us. We are thankful to them for this and hope that they will continue to support us. Website: www.craftkhana.mozello.com You can follow us on facebook: www.facebook.com/craftkhana You can reach us at: craftkhana@gmail.com